Joel Siegel Reviews 'The Mexican'
March 1 -- There's been a bit of controversy over Dreamworks' ad campaign for The Mexican, which makes it appear as a Brad Pitt/Julia Roberts romantic comedy when the two share a bare 15 minutes of screen time. Well, it's not a bare 15 minutes at all. Believe me — that's not part of the problem, that's part of the solution.
The film starts with Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts together. She is playing the cinematic equivalent of a thumbnail scraping against a blackboard. She wants to go to Vegas to follow her dream — work her way through croupier school as a cocktail waitress. Pitt, though, has got to go to Mexico to bring back an antique pistol or the mob will kill him. Presented with what most of us would call unassailable logic, she assails. "Me, me, me," she shrieks, "all you think about is me. If you don't go with me I'll never see you again!" How does this kind of dialogue get into a movie? Doesn't anybody read this or hear this and say … "no"?
No. All they hear is Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts — how can they miss? What I want to say is… you want to know how they can miss? You gotta see The Mexican. But if I say that I'll get quoted: "You gotta see The Mexican, Joel Siegel, Good Morning America." And that's not what I meant.
This film tells four stories and tells none of them well.
STORY 1: Pitt and Roberts together.
STORY 2: Pitt in Mexico after the pistol.
STORY 3: The legend of the pistola El Mexicano.
STORY 4: Roberts kidnapped by hitman James Gandolfini.
Story 2
Pitt finds the pistol easily enough, in a series of fairly funny bits that play off of our stereotypes and Pitt's wide-eyed, nutball innocence and enthusiasm. I like him.
He's under orders to bring the pistol and the kid who has it back to the states. But the kid gets shot in the top of the head by the Mexicanos while celebrating Cinco de Mayo. As he's reporting this in, on a pay phone (when will movies discover cell phones?), his car gets stolen with the pistol, of course, inside.
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